If you haven't read any of the vicious reviews for Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom—that heartwarming new HBO show about a rich white man who finally finds the COURAGE to be an opinionated dipshit on TV—go read them. They're a hater's delight (Dan Rather's excepted), and they must have gotten under Aaron Sorkin's onion peel-thin skin, because he took time over the weekend to be a complete asshole to Toronto Globe and Mail writer Sarah Nicole Prickett. But before insulting her, he of course had to make a grand statement about WRITING and about WHAT AARON SORKIN THINKS OF THE WORLD TODAY:

A note from Dan Rather: I'm aware that my musings run counter to some of the more prominent…
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"I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties," he says. "I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate."

Think about how fucking stupid that statement is. Back in the 1940s, America was still segregated. Gays had no rights. Women were repressed. The food was AWFUL. Aaron Sorkin's hardon for the past is no different from Trent Lott's hardon for the past. In fact, it's even worse because Sorkin somehow believes he is the ONLY person in America who understands this, and it's his mission to get everyone on the same page. There's a self-imposed nobility to him that makes me wanna throw up in my sink. WE GOTTA GO BACK, EVERYONE. EDWARD R. MURROW AND SHIT.

"Listen here, Internet girl," he says, getting up. "It wouldn't kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while."

Seriously, who the fuck talks to people like this? "Internet girl"? Prickett wasn't even writing her piece for those snarky intertubes. She was writing it for a fucking newspaper. The paternalism that Sorkin displays here is repugnant. He sounds like Buzz Bissinger laying into Will Leitch four years ago. The only difference is that Bissinger, in all his madness, actually came to accept the Internet and now actively participates in it (and oh, what a treat that is). In other words, Bissinger makes Sorkin look like a goddamn dinosaur. Sorkin is still futilely trying to turn back the clock, still trying to fight an unwinnable war that no one else wants to wage.

I say also, factually, "I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?" He looks surprised...

Who is surprised by this? Whoa hey, you read shit and watch movies? YOU MUST BE SOME KIND OF SUPERGIRL.

...then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised. "I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five," he says.

God, what a prick. Aaron Sorkin is the worst kind of writer: Someone who eschews things like "story" and "likable characters" in favor of speaking directly AT you, the viewer. It's like a shitty HuffPo column in dramatized form. Most people get this writing habit beaten out of them by the end of college. But Sorkin never left his little ivory tower where he sniffs his own farts, so he just keeps on writing self-congratulatory bullshit and getting lauded for it (at least, up until now). Screw him and all the actors who go batshit for him. The only reason actors revere Sorkin is because actors are stupid and Sorkin gives them shitloads of lines to read. Aaron Sorkin is the goddamn worst.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I am mentioned in Prickett's article, along with this post I wrote about Sorkin back in January. But Prickett wasn't entirely complimentary of that post. She called it "jejune," which I thought was a nice word until I looked it up and found out it meant "dry and uninteresting.")